Bluetooth is one of typical short range wireless technologies for exchanging information among various devices such as smart phones, PCs, earphones, and headphones.
Bluetooth technology is now adopted by most of smart phones, PCs, and notebooks; and is widely used for the convenience of use. The easy pairing process of Bluetooth technology provides reliable connectivity among different devices. LE, that is, a recent Bluetooth variant, is capable of providing information of hundreds of kilobytes reliably while requiring considerably reduced power consumption.
The Bluetooth core specification includes basic rate/enhanced data rate (BR/EDR) and low energy (LE) version.
Of the two versions, Bluetooth low energy (hereinafter, it is called ‘BLE’) is a subset of Bluetooth Specification v4.0, aimed for high energy efficiency compared with the former Bluetooth specifications.
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the number of devices carried by a user and the number of devices around the user are greatly increased.
BLE has been designed for the purpose of high energy efficiency in performing various wireless communication functions, but requires slight high power in performing a function, such as scanning for continuously searching for a surrounding device.
A procedure of searching for a surrounding device, that is, a scanning procedure, is an essential procedure in a wireless communication procedure. Accordingly, if available energy resources of a device are small, a phenomenon in which smooth wireless communication is not performed because scanning is not performed may occur.
Such a phenomenon becomes severe when surrounding retrieved devices are many, and may act as a fatal problem in performing wireless communication.
Furthermore, when a network is configured using a plurality of BLE devices, if scanning is performed on only a specific device, the entire network may be broken due to the exhaustion of energy of one device.
Furthermore, when a user performs search, he or she requests information from surrounding devices and obtains the information therefrom. In this case, if the surrounding devices are connected, it may be inefficient for each device to provide its own information to each user.